Remote backup management tool keeps Intermountain Gas on top

By Elisabeth Horwitt, Contributor 23 Aug 2006 | SearchSMB.com

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The public energy utility and gas exploration firm serves a large portion of the northwest, from Colorado down to Mexico. With an end-user base of about 400 serving 260,000-plus customers, Intermountain is highly distributed: "We have small outback offices, regional offices, exploration sites where the natural gas and oil deposits are," said Fred Leakeas, the utility's technical services manager.

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While larger sites had their own IT staffs, the smaller sites basically left end users largely on their own when it came to technical support. Central IT staff had no way of determining when, or whether, servers were getting backed up to tape. All too frequently Leakeas found that, "people forgot, or didn't do it correctly."

Clearly, Intermountain Gas needed some kind of centralized backup administration. Backing up remote sites to the data center wouldn't work because of the expense of setting up T1 links, Leakeas said. "We're in sagebrush country with hundreds of miles between locations," Leakeas said.

Leakeas evaluated the various backup software products currently in use at remote sites: specialized Unix software, Cheyenne's ArcServe for the Novell NetWare servers, Veritas Software Corp.'s Backup Exec for Windows and some homegrown code as well. He concluded they were either too system-specific or "not enterprise enough" to meet Intermountain's needs.

His eventual choice was Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OmniBack. One major selling point: The remote backup management software is fully integrated with HP's OpenView, which Intermountain Gas was using to manage its networks, servers and applications, even cell phones.

"There's a big plasma screen on our data center wall that does nothing but OpenView monitoring," Leakeas said. IT administrators would be able to use that same console and graphical user interface to schedule, initiate and monitor backup jobs at remote sites. HP sent in a group to do proof of concept for Leakeas' group. "We were impressed," Leakeas said.

Living proof

Five years later, Intermountain is still using OmniBack. Now called Data Protector, it is part of HP's StorageWorks family but still closely integrated with OpenView.

"Five years ago, we didn't know the status of remote backups," Leakeas said. "Now all the right people get sent a complete picture, which they can scan in five minutes."

The benefits have been substantial. "I would say that our reliability has increased by 50% since we installed it," Leakeas said. The icing on the cake: "We've probably saved one whole position, maybe even a person and a half."

He added: "I think Data Protector is one of those underappreciated products. If more people knew about it, they'd be impressed."

Dianne McAdam, director of enterprise information assurance at the Wellesley, Mass.-based consulting firm The Clipper Group Inc., agrees. "Data Protector is perhaps HP's best-kept secret," she said. Companies looking for a remote backup solution typically go to major players like Veritas and Legato and EMC, she said. But Data Protector customers she has talked to are generally enthusiastic, particularly about the product's ease of use and set up, as well as HP's aggressive pricing. "Plus the fact that it works with everybody else's tape drives," McAdam said.

HP has continued to enhance Data Protector, so it has kept up with Intermountain Gas's evolving computing and backup strategies. During the past few years, the utility has installed tape libraries and robotic libraries, as well as high-speed Linear Tape Open 3 devices, at many of its remote sites. Some sites still have the older single tape drives -- Data Protector supports both new and old. It also supports a growing roster of Unix, Linux, Novell, Windows and Sun Microsystems Inc. servers.

Next steps

Now Leakeas is planning to extend Data Protector's domain to the HP EVA 8000 storage area network (SAN) slated for installation at headquarters in the next few months. Leakeas said he expects the consolidation of files onto a single storage pool and network infrastructure to result in significant cost savings in terms of both hardware and administrative staffing.

Leakeas' group is currently in the process of architecting the SAN and testing out management products, such as HP's Storage Essentials offering. The tool can help administrators analyze applications' performance across the SAN, and track storage utilization and available capacity on an application-by-application basis.

Driving Intermountain Gas's evolving IT strategy is the need to ensure dependability and continuity of computing resources and services, so it can reliably serve its customers, Leakeas emphasized. "By taking people out of the [backup] equation, we increase the dependability of our data and also make ourselves bulletproof in terms of liability."

Leakeas said he has checked out some of Data Protector's chief rivals in the backup management space but sees no reason to change. "Lots of products come and go, and then you have to press the reset button and spend a million" on a replacement, he said. "This one has evolved with us."

Elisabeth Horwitt is a contributing writer based in Waban, Mass.

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